The Recruiter
by The Poison Ivy League
Summary: From the very beginning, SHIELD has always had an unorthodox and demanding recruitment process. They need remarkable people, and will go to great lengths to ensure all their agents are constantly pushing themselves to their limits, and sometimes they give a little push in the right direction.


Natasha is under the impression that she owes Clint something, some great karmic debt, because he went against orders and spared her life. She thinks him soft hearted, that his care for her compromises him. Natasha is the best agent Barton has ever seen, you would never take her for a Soviet, her accent is flawless and she can convincingly argue against the designated hitter rule like she grew up eating ballpark hotdogs and singing the star spangled banner. Both those things are a lie, although if Natasha ever figures out the first one, then the second one will probably become true. Clint will likely not be alive to see it, because if that mess with James Howlett in Nicaragua that took Nick's eye and left him with a bullet lodged in his head didn't kill him, the guy is probably immortal. So Fury will live to witness it, Barton's best work. That really always has been the idea. Barton isn't Frank Castle, with the ability to fight like a demon and lick up war like sugar, even decades after the first kill. Time stops for people like Fury, Castle, and Rogers. Time doesn't stop for nobodies from the Midwest who just happen to be able to hit a target, but they have long since planned for the day Barton's knees and back finally leave him a moment too slow. Natasha has always been the asset, the mark, the mission; because SHIELD has always been the mission.

So this is how the story goes. In the old days, SHIELD was basically a black ops unit of Fury, Barton plus a couple others and a drinks tab picked up by Howard Stark while they schemed to bring down the Soviet Union. Hill, Coulson, Sitwell, those were names and faces that wouldn't be relevant until years later, that was a whole different era, a different world. Life back then was being an underpaid, hyperviolent civil servant in a cheap suit, smoking hashish over arms deals, getting drunk with third world scum in dive bars and renting office space in Fairfax County at a place that smelled like the cleaning crew forgot it existed. There was the occasional bloodbath or political intrigue to ensure they had to sober up some of the time. No helicarrier, no quinjets, barely any funding that wasn't blood money of some sort. After Berlin, when the Wall came down, they were kind of shocked; no one really expected them to actually get the job done. Clint never expected to live long after Fury pulled a punk kid out of a life sentence at Hotel Leavenworth; he was just some loose cannon with a smart mouth Fury could point at a problem and tell him to fire until it went away. A liar, crook and a killer; the only true things in life he knew were things like the four constant clicks of the rifle bolt – up and back, forward and down – made the world seem like clockwork, made the world make sense. Eventually though, he had an actual life, actually met a girl and got married, not that his marriage outlived the Soviet Union by much. Needless to say, they needed more manpower if they were ever going to turn Washington's expectations about a post-Soviet world into a reality. Some efforts had been made to bring in top tier talent; Castle, Wilson, Masters, Spector, or Poindexter but they had come up pretty much empty. Barton had suggested Howlett, it seemed he had volunteered for some program that had left his memory somewhat spotty, so Nick wouldn't have had to worry about the bastard bringing up old problems but that bullet in Nick's head left him rather short tempered in regards to the Canadian. On the plus side, they suddenly were getting billions from the Hill in funding, Hank Pym's crazy tequila soaked spit balling about flying aircraft carriers were suddenly being taking seriously. That guy still doesn't get enough respect to this day as far as Barton is concerned, and Clint isn't just saying that because he feels bad about banging Hank's wife. Richards and Stark may get all the accolades but Hank has a scary brain, which is why Clint really hopes Janet's indiscretions don't come to light until after he is cold in the ground. Anyways, they needed real field experience, real talent to go with the army of suits and rookies starting to make up the majority of Nick's private fiefdom.

Respectability was the new watch word; no more waking up hungover next to dumpsters or using safe houses or wiretaps to either cheat on your wife or catch her cheating; suddenly there were protocols and Ivy League analysts doing election models for Whereverthefuckistan with computers that weren't built from spare parts, satellite surveillance and a phone line that actually reached the White House. You had to shave and shower before showing up to work, and accountants and lawyers scrutinized your reports, on top of the mindboggling fact that people actually wanted a paper trail for the kind of work he did, accountability, imagine that. Clint began to realize he was becoming a dinosaur.

It was around that time when chatter about the Red Room got intercepted, some Soviet horror show that came to light in the days of the Wild East and craven capitalism, assets going freelance, middle management looking to sell intelligence. The Black Widow, young, so young; an asset for the future, for a new world. How to recruit such raw talent though? Turning Soviet agents was tough under regular circumstances, the rule book was out the window in those days of Yeltsin's lawless nation of gangsters and hookers; no one was sure where anyone stood, no one was sure how to secure loyalty. Ideology? Money? Fear? It was a gamble. They had to come at this sideways; this was the kind of work that definitely wouldn't find its way into a file somewhere. Recruiting what was essentially a child soldier was never going to fly with a Senate oversight committee.

Natalia Romanova, the closest thing to a finished product the program had, was a desperate little kid watching her prison crumble to reveal a frightening new world; an elegant teenager with no real mind of her own. A dancer's grace, a liar's tongue, some creature dreamed by minds like Andropov and Grigorovich. Fast and smart, ruthless and efficient, the kind of almost robotic technique and single mindedness that only came from Soviet drilling. Intelligence from their Colonel on the inside, Petrovich, some tired old warhorse that had made his name during the Battle of Stalingrad, revealed no one was sure what the hell to do with Designate 2R. Good old Uncle Ivan seemed to think that the place was going to end up scorched earth in an effort to wrap up loose ends, and that fear was beginning to trickle down to the girls, mostly scared orphans who never really finished the program. So Natalia had no trouble believing there were monsters waiting in the shadows, hunters spreading heartbreak in their wake. That was the easiest sell in the world. Barton was a legend from the Balkans to the Korean peninsula; a monstrous shadow that would slit your throat, garrote your mistress and burn your house down while your family sleep in their beds. Don't cross Fury or they'll find your corpse with arrows buried in your eye sockets they would whisper, nowhere was safe, the Hawk never misses a target.

The shining light of twenty eight young girls took him to a city with no name, which exists on no map, far north of the Arctic Circle. He treated the initial engagement like slaughterhouse, blew away the zookeepers and watched the smart ones run, all in all, two girls made it out. He made sure they saw the tactical team dressed in stolen Russian uniforms prepare to burn the place to the ground. Made it look like a jailbreak for those that would come looking afterwards for answers in the ashes and snow. The Russians thought it was rogue assets, the girls thought it was a cleanup. He left the closest thing Natalia would ever have to a father, Ivan gutted in the snow with a saperka, as a cherry on top of the cover story.

So began a merry chase. The Belova girl, the pale little spider, ran for Cuba; that was disappointing, it lacked imagination. Little Natalia ran for the free market, it showed ambition, though initially her resume of largely industrial espionage was somewhat disappointing. Fury was concerned without her Russian taskmaster's guiding hand she lacked the edge, the killer instinct, Clint was sure she just needed to find her legs in the world. Then came Drakov's daughter, so broken and bloody; he left the photos on Nick's desk before shipping out for Somalia, their little spider had some venom in her still. Sao Paulo he heard about while in Kosovo, the attack she led on the stock exchange was brazen and brutal, and the video of the Chechen hospital burnt to the ground just to kill one man that greeted him on his return from the Congo is inspired. Their little girl was all growing up; it was time to bring her in.

The first step was having her feel the pressure, let her know the noose was around her neck. Intelligence got leaked to the Russians on her whereabouts to provide a second front, while Barton took a trip to Cuba to visit young Yelena, and made sure word of it reached Romanova's ears. While at the same time Fury had SHIELD tactical units hit several of her safe houses, assets were frozen by the bean counters and computer jockeys that made up the office staff in those days. They needed her to start running, needed her to feel the fear and panic, jump at long shadows and flinch at strange noises. This time he could pack the bow, the party piece, he had to leave his signature

The world become a playground, with the ever shrinking boundaries staked out by arrows and bodies, Fury watched as Clint herded her exactly where he needed her to be. Kosovo, a place where she thought she might find some escape, disappear in a warzone but Barton knew pretty little girls only found horror in places like that. Natalia might have been a great spy, a competent assassin, but she wasn't bred for the battlefield, wasn't a soldier. She operated in a largely civilized world, in a cold detached manner, there she would feel the heat, noise and stink of war; the lawless carnage. Natalia had never ever slept with sustained machinegun fire as a lullaby in a bombed out building, or had the stench of bodies baking in the sun as a wakeup call. Barton had seen the order of the Russian facility, watched the video of carefully structured brainwashing program, read the extensive files on the training regime they kept, and seen how they cultivated her like a hothouse flower. Clint had also seen the luxury of her Paris and Milan hideaways, run his hand across her soft sheets, smelt her perfumes and stared into her closets bursting with the latest fashions. Clint had watched her through his scope eat in the finest restaurants and order the most expensive wines; it was a world away from the sniper fire and war crimes of the Balkans. There was a dichotomy to his little killer spider, she was a creature bred for a delicate touch; there was softness that the Soviet's mental manipulations had left her with and the wide world had indulged, and Clint would have to bleed that out of her. Clint would break her there in mountains, and drag something new down.

Clint pursued her relentlessly. Ensured she had little sleep, barely any food, pushed her in the worst of the chaos. Little Natalia had to stare the worst of the horror right in face, she had to realize how young and weak she was, break her down. When SHIELD was finished building her back up, she would be without fear, without limit.

Broken, hungry and tired he found her staring into a mass grave; on the run from death squads, warlords, sex and organ traffickers, as well as him. It was only there, defeated and cornered, worn down by horror that she could take his hand. Believe that maybe he was as ruined by that place and that life as she was, that he couldn't take that last step to have join the bodies in that hole, because there were too many dead here already. There he could offer her safety, he could offer her redemption he would never know and only there she could accept it. There she could seem him as a man guarding a soft heart, Nick had taught him well, and one day she would be even better. What Natalia, now Natasha, doesn't know is that had she not taken his hand, well, there was a reason their chase ended at a grave mouth. So far, Natasha was everything they could hope for and more, Clint knew the moment she was willing to walk into battlefield to face Loki, possibly with no backup against magic and monsters, it had all been worth it.

Sometimes Barton just needs to tell someone just how well it worked out, someone who would care, so he goes down into the cold, cold bowels of headquarters. There is a room that doesn't exist but for a handful of people, talks with little Yelena, tells her how well her sister is doing. Hopes when it's her turn to step up, she can follow her sister's example, do them all proud. Yelena, still so youthful, doesn't talk back, but that's okay, he just hopes she is listening.


End file.
